(_α_) Furthermore, inasmuch as poetry does not accept the universal in scientific abstraction from its object, but seeks to represent what is rational under the mode of individuality,[6] the specific traits of national character are essential to its growth; the content and the particular mode of its presentation are in fact conditioned by the nature of these and the general outlook in each case. We find it consequently adapting itself to every variety of form and peculiarity. It matters not what the poetry may be, whether Oriental, Italian, Spanish, English, Roman, Hellenic, or German, each and all differ totally in their spirit, emotional impulse, general outlook and expression. A similar distinctive variety asserts itself in particular epochs as they are favourable to the art of poetry or the reverse. The results secured, for example, by our German poetry were impossible in the Middle Ages, or the times of the thirty years' war. The particular motives, which in our own day excite the greatest interest, are inseparable from the entire evolution of contemporary life. And in the same way every age has its own wider or more restricted, more exalted and liberal, or more depressed phase of emotional life, in short its specific outlook on the world, which it is the express aim of poetry to bring home to the artistic consciousness in the most intelligible and complete manner, inasmuch as language is the one medium capable of expressing the human spirit wherever and in whatever form it may be manifested. (_β_) Among these national characteristics, or views and opinions peculiar to particular epochs, some have closer affinity with the poetic impulse than others. The Oriental consciousness is, for example, in general more poetic than the Western mind, if we exclude Greece. In the East the principle predominant is always that of coherence, solidity, unity, substance. An outlook of this nature is intrinsically most penetrative, even though it may fail to reach the freedom of the Ideal. Our Western point of view, especially that of modern life, is based on the endless breaking up and division of its boundless material into fragments, in virtue of which process, the extreme emphasis laid here on particular facts, what is merely finite becomes substantive for the imagination, and despite of this must be once more subsumed under the converse action of relativity. For the Oriental nothing persists as really substantive, but everything appears as contingent, discovering its supreme focus, stability and final justification in the One, the Absolute, to which it is referred.